Possible prebiotic catalysts formed from adenine and aldehyde

Careful examination of the present metabolism and in vitro selection of various catalytic RNAs strongly support the “RNA World” hypothesis of the origin of life. However, in this scenario, the difficult prebiotic synthesis of ribose and consequently of nucleotides remain a major problem. In order to overcome this problem and obtain nucleoside analogs, we are investigating reactions of the nucleic acid base, adenine 1, with different aldehydes under presumably prebiotic conditions. In the reaction of adenine and pyruvaldehyde 2 in water, we report here the formation in high yield of two isomeric products. These compounds possessing alcohols functions as nucleosides result from condensation of two molecules of pyruvaldehyde on the 6-amino group of one adenine molecule. Their catalytic activities in the model hydrolysis of p-nitrophenylesters appeared interesting in the search of prebiotic catalysts.